✒Summertime, sort of, and the living is easy for the Daily Mail's anonymous readers' editor. Last week (Saturday to Friday), the workload of the masked man or woman consisted of a single 40-word correction, while the gaffe-collecting US blog Regret the Error counted just five in the whole of June. The site also underlines the marked downward trend by reproducing another blog's splendidly anoraky graph covering all corrections since Paul Dacre announced the column's introduction during his Leveson inquiry turn. Quoting the Mail's own figure of about 80,000 words in each issue, Regret the Error's Craig Silverman expresses cynical disbelief in an average score of one mistake a week, but Monkey prefers to think the readers' editor's mere existence has forced hacks to raise their game. Awkward for such a generous view, however, is the same blog's graph for the Mail on Sunday: in some weeks, it admits to making more errors in its single issue than the daily title does in six.

✒Adverts we're unlikely to see again on TV, no 67: any of those Michael Gambon-voiced HSBC ads (particularly the one with the little Japanese girl learning all about how to hide money) proclaiming it "the world's local bank". In the light of HSBC's condemnation last week by a US Senate committee for allowing "drug kingpins and rogue nations" to launder their profits, the long-running campaign's message of tolerant sensitivity to local customs ("understanding people and their values", as the blurb to one put it) would now have an embarrassing subtext. But do try to find them on YouTube.

✒A Fleet Street era may be ending: Roger Alton – veteran executive editor of the Times, unofficial chief public defender of the beleaguered Murdoch titles and former editor of the Observer and Independent – was heard the other day telling a colleague: "Don't worry, I won't fucking well be here in January to boss you around." Alarmed, Monkey's snout asked the living legend if retirement is really on the cards. "I may well be having to leave as I will be 65 [in December]," he said, "but I haven't had any conversations with anybody here yet." So there's a chance he may stay on? "Well, it's nonsense to say I'll definitely be going."

✒Why has Nicola Fairbrother won a place in the BBC's squad of Olympics presenters and pundits? As an explanation, the top line of her biog on the Beeb's website is straightforward and unusually candid: all you need to know is that she is "one of Great Britain's strongest women fighters". Peer at the small print and there's a buried mention of feats in judo, but the image lingers of the likes of Clare Balding and Barry Davies trembling as they make room for her on the sofa.

✒Dancing NHS nurses are famously to appear in Danny Boyle's Olympics opening ceremony pageant on Friday, but it's too little known that they'll all be female, while the doctors are all male; so a show broadcast by the BBC will have a sexist undercurrent it would never contemplate in a drama or comedy over which it has editorial control – reportedly because a traditional division of gender roles is deemed easier for TV viewers to understand. But which viewers? Not those in the US, which aired ER (with its many female doctors and male nurses) for 15 years, or in the countless countries that bought the hospital drama.